TV star Robert Rinder says he ‘can’t escape presence of anti-Semitism every single day’

Robert Rinder says it is our “shared human duty” to stand up against hate in all its forms as the world prepares to remember one of its darkest chapters.

The celebrity, the grandson of a Holocaust survivor, has been the victim of vile anti-Semitic abuse.

And he remains horrified at the scale of unchecked anti-Jewish sentiment swirling unchecked on social media.

The worrying trend has seen celebrities like Countdown’s Rachel Riley and actress Tracy Ann Oberman targeted because of their heritage.

On January 27, the world will fall silent to commemorate the 80th anniversary of liberation of Auschwitz, the Nazi death camp where men, women and children were taken to be put to death because of their faith.

Robert, Chair of the Holocaust Memorial Day Trust advisory board, said: “Before social media I wasn’t aware of how ubiquitous and pervasive it was.

“I can’t escape from the presence of anti-Semitism because I see it every single day.

“It’s the idea that Jews control the media. It’s the idea that there is an organised conspiracy governing the world. It’s the idea that there is more than one Jewish state.

“It’s the disproportionate view people take of the number of Jews in our country.

“It’s the existence of conspiracy theories retweeted when none, or very little, responsibility on the part of the platforms is taken to take them down.

“And young people are infected by the malignancy of that stuff and then retweet it. The tragedy is those are the exact sordid foundations that led to the building and ultimate horror of Auschwitz.”

The Hamas murder spree in on October 7, 2023, was the deadliest attack on Jews since the Holocaust in which men, women and children were mercilessly slaughtered. More than 1,200 were killed during the incursion.

The incursion – and subsequent retaliation – triggered shockwaves across the world and sparked frequent and open attacks on Jews in cities known for tolerance and peace, most notably London.

In the first six months of last year the Community Security Trust, a Jewish charity, recorded 1,978 antisemitic hate incidents – more than double those in the first half of 2023.

The rise was attributed to the fallout from the massacre.

Some 1,037 of the self-reported incidents were in London, including 411 in Barnet, where Britain’s biggest Jewish community calls home.

The defining moment of Robert’s life came when he discovered his maternal grandfather, Morris Malenicky, whose family were gassed in the Treblinka death camp, managed to escape the Nazis’ clutches and start a new life in Britain. He was among those brought to the UK by a Jewish charity in 1945, part of a group of 732 child refugees known as the Windermere Boys. He died aged 78 in 2001.

Barrister and TV star Robert said: “Holocaust Memorial Day this year reminds us of our shared human duty to stand against hate in all its forms, wherever it takes place and in whatever malignant guise. It teaches us that democracy, technology, advanced culture, all of the outward vestiges of the modern world…none of these things have the power to safeguard freedom. That responsibility instead begins and ends with you, with me, with us. Only then will genocide become a dark detail of humanity’s past.

“Though not alone in the history of genocide, the Holocaust is – perhaps – a volcano in a dark landscape. It emerged in a place that wasn’t the most fertile ground for anti jewish racism.

“Germany was a nation of advanced culture, science, and art. Democracy had taken root. Race, religion, even sexuality had begun its slow walk into incidental detail, where human beings might – in time – be judged on the content of their character.

“Many Germans, Jewish or not, felt free. They trusted that their freedoms; to live where they chose, marry who they loved, work in the profession they had a passion for would endure. These freedoms had been won, been fought for. They couldn’t not be lost. How could they ever be lost? This was, after all, a democracy. They were wrong. Things changed in the flap of a butterflies’ wing.”